What if you prayed for food and some friend or neighbor showed up with food, would that qualify as having your wishes/prayers fulfilled or does it have to come from some supernatural force or show up from thin air?
To switch a perspective if you wanted evidence of my existence and you set all these huge parameters on the expression of that evidence.... Like in order for you to believe in me I must fly to NY, climb to the top of the Empire State Building at Midnight dressed in purple with mini cheesecakes in hand....
I would ignore you. Nothing personal. I just would. Your belief in my existence is just not important enough to me for me to jump through hoops like that. The god of the bible behaved as if it were VERY important everyone believed in him and basically provided miracles when someone was pissing him off or he otherwise wasn't getting his way.
Or..some random interesting event happened and people people said it was god or god took credit for it.
Me on the other hand if you wanted a cheesecake that badly I'd send you one..obligation free. I wouldn't care if you believed in me. It's not important that you do.
In this respect humans have the ability to be more god like than the God of the bible.
To switch a perspective if you wanted evidence of my existence and you set all these huge parameters on the expression of that evidence.... Like in order for you to believe in me I must fly to NY, climb to the top of the Empire State Building at Midnight dressed in purple with mini cheesecakes in hand....
I would ignore you. Nothing personal. I just would. Your belief in my existence is just not important enough to me for me to jump through hoops like that. The god of the bible behaved as if it were VERY important everyone believed in him and basically provided miracles when someone was pissing him off or he otherwise wasn't getting his way.
Or..some random interesting event happened and people people said it was god or god took credit for it.
Me on the other hand if you wanted a cheesecake that badly I'd send you one..obligation free. I wouldn't care if you believed in me. It's not important that you do.
In this respect humans have the ability to be more god like than the God of the bible.
(March 24, 2014 at 9:14 am)LostLocke Wrote: For this 'experiment' there isn't really enough information by itself to make me believe. At least not without further research.
I mean, granted, praying for a plate of food, and then having that plate of food appear out of nowhere would be a unique and unusual event. It would definitely warrant consideration and further study.
But, some other things I would also consider right off the bat:
- I'm hallucinating the food. Yes, I see it, feel it, even might be 'eating' it, but serious hallucinations are that real to the people hallucinating them.
- My own mind/brain holds the power to generate that food out of nothing. I have some type of ESP/super power.
- If it's food that I normally cook and eat, maybe I cooked this dish one year from now, and my home was hit with a massive dose of electromagnetic energy that caused this plate to time shift back to today.
- Mean spirited aliens are having fun with me.
As ridiculous as some of these sound, there's no specific reason why they can't be any more possible than a deity answering my prayer. And will the possibility that it was a god doing this enter my mind? Of course. But I'm not going to go right to that as "the answer" while rejecting everything else. Until I have more info, I have to allow for all possibilities. And if I never get any more info, then I just have to live with the fact that 'I don't know' what happened.
